Performance Max campaigns are a great way to complement your keyword-based search campaigns and find more converting customers across all of Google’s channels.
Smart bidding and real-time optimisation help you improve performance based on your specified conversion goals.
To do this Google uses AI across bidding, budget optimization, audiences, creatives, attribution, and more to enhance campaign performance.
As with anything AI-related, you get out what you put in.
So, with this in mind, to give you more control and deeper insights into your campaign performance, Google has launched five new ways to enhance your Performance Max campaigns.
In this post we’ll look at:
- New types of customer lifecycle goals to help you connect with the right customers and keep them engaged
- More control over your reach with IP exclusions
- Testing optimisation strategies in real-time
- More detailed demographic data to help you better understand your audience
- New budget pacing insights that show real-time spend tracking
1. Customer lifecycle goals
Targeting the right audiences is an essential part of your campaign. Missing the mark here means less effective ads and wasted budget.
Google has launched new types of customer lifecycle goals to help you tailor your Performance Max campaigns and reach the best audiences for your business.
Alongside the recently launched new customer acquisition goal to help you prioritize finding new customers, you can now focus on acquiring high-value customers.
But the new additions don’t stop there.
A new retention goal is now available in beta to help you win back customers who have lapsed.
These new features combine your first-party data with Google AI to unlock greater value from new and existing customers and deliver the strongest return on investment at different stages of the customer lifecycle.
2. More control with IP exclusions
Improving campaign performance is all about the optimisations you make.
The starting point for Performance Max campaigns is choosing the right campaign goal in order to guide Google AI towards your most relevant audience.
But now you can further refine this by using IP exclusions to prevent specific IP addresses from seeing your ads.
This is great news for larger organisations that might have hundreds or thousands of employees sitting in different departments. Or even agencies that run ads on behalf of clients.
Excluding your company’s IP address means you can prevent your staff from unknowingly eating up your ad budget by clicking on your ads.
3. Realtime test and learn
We mentioned previously that optimisation is the key to ongoing improvements to your campaigns.
The key to unlocking the best refinements is experimentation.
The good news is that Google is launching a range of new experimentation features for Performance Max over the coming months.
These will allow you to quickly and easily test optimisation strategies within a single Performance Max campaign to see if they drive better outcomes.
The first new feature you’ll be able to test is Final URL expansion.
Advertisers who use Final URL expansion with Performance Max campaigns see an average increase of over 9% in conversions/conversion value at a similar Cost Per Action (CPA)/Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
What can you learn from Final URL expansion tests?
In a nutshell, Final URL expansion is all about matching your landing pages to user search intent.
Running this test helps you understand whether replacing your final URL with a more relevant landing page from your website drives stronger results by better matching a user’s search intent.
The Final URL expansion experiment splits your traffic. A portion is dedicated to testing this feature while tracking performance against your original setup.
4. Better understand your audience with new demographic data
We mentioned the importance of targeting the right audience earlier on in this post.
And there’s good news on this front in these latest updates from Google.
Detailed demographics are rolling out now in asset audience insights. This means that now, alongside existing interest and behavioral data, you can gain an understanding of your audience’s age and gender.
This will be a great way of identifying untapped audiences and new segments to test ad campaigns against.
5. Optimize your budget using budget pacing insights
Continuing the theme of optimisation, new budget pacing updates are being launched to help you find more opportunities.
This new insight will provide real-time spend tracking.
What does this mean for you?
You’ll now be able to see current and projected spend alongside your forecast conversion performance.
These pacing insights will help inform decisions on where to move spend between campaigns. If one campaign is underpacing and another becoming limited by budget you’ll be able to assess spend against conversions and move budget if it makes sense to do so.
